How to Set Up and Run a Multi-Channel E-commerce Campaign

The issue of conversion rates is a fairly controversial one, seeing as how it’s fairly difficult to profit from even the best of conversion rates if your traffic is fairly low. Therefore, you need to find a way to drive as many qualified leads to your ecommerce website as possible. Even the most predictable and unitary of demographics doesn’t spend all of their time on a single channel, which is why the only viable course of action for you to follow is the formation of a multi-channel ecommerce marketing campaign.

At the same time, you also want to present your goods on as many different platforms, such as Amazon and eBay, as well as your own Shopify, Magento or WordPress website. Sure, after a while, the greatest majority of ecommerce entrepreneurs transition to their own website. Yet, withdrawing from these other platforms may not be the best course of action, just yet.

Here are some rules on how to set up and run all of this:

Timing the campaign

At the very start, you need to consider the way in which you are going to integrate your content (the most crucial aspect of any marketing campaign) with your multi-channel offer.

The first thing you need to consider is the fact that you need to time the publishing of content in the best way possible in order not to overwhelm your audience. Think about it, posting something on your website, your YouTube channel, your Facebook page and your Instagram story may seem like a good idea, however, what if there are several pieces of content you want to be published. Sending a single message through various mediums is a viable idea, yet, adhering to several unrelated concepts at the same time can be confusing even to your marketing team, let alone your audience.

Most importantly, doing this from the very start makes it incredibly difficult to accurately measure the ROI of your efforts. Sure, if a person follows a link directly from your Facebook page or your YouTube channel, you’ll get an idea of where they are coming from.

However, what happens if they don’t come right away? How will you know which medium gave your traffic the greatest boost? How will you know which piece of content turned out to be the most effective? In order to get the most out of this A/B testing, it’s pivotal that you time your campaign in the best way possible.

Use adequate tools

Another important thing worth keeping in mind is the fact that your eCommerce campaign simply can’t function without adequate software support. You see, things like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and SEO may not look that terrifying to a tech-savvy business owner in 2018, yet, when combined, they pose too much work for a single person to handle manually.

Here, you’ll have two alternatives, either starting a digital marketing team or getting specialized platforms to help you out. Needless to say, the latter also gives you the privilege of handling everything on your own, thus cutting down your expenses and enabling a smoother coordination.

Separating your products

The reason why so many companies make subsidiaries is in order not to confuse their customers with various different brand messages. When looking for quality, high-end products, customers commonly look for specialized companies, those with strong roots in this industry and a focus on a single niche. They believe that this specialization serves as a guarantee of reliability.

From the perspective of a multi-channel eCommerce campaign, there’s some logic to this, seeing as how offering too great of a variety of products might diminish your reliability. Instead, why not look for a platform that will allow you to perform large-scale marketplace ecommerce operations with multiple vendors and even multiple brands, should the need arise? Brands like Omnyfy offer multi-vendor ecommerce software that are flexible enough for omni-channel ecommerce campaigns.

Naturally, on platforms like eBay and Amazon, you might not need to go that far, while it’s probably for the best to make separate e-stores for products thematically belonging to different industries.

Alternative customer support tools

The next thing you need to understand is that there are other ways to provide customer support, rather than displaying a contact email or a phone number. As the matter of fact, it’s much better if you could find a way to do so informally. This can be easily done through social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Apart from making the customer support process much less formal and more relatable, this is also a great way to get other social media users involved (in the sense of a support community). This way, you stand to reduce the cost of your customer service and boost its efficiency at the same time. Most importantly, you’ll set out on a path that ends in a stronger brand community as a whole.

Automate as much as you can

One of the aspects of a multi-channel campaign that often gets overlooked is the issue of automation. Due to the volume of work, the mere inclusion of high-end software we’ve discussed earlier on may not be enough. Therefore, you need to take some serious considerations when it comes to planning out your marketing automation workflows.

Especially if you’re out running things with a small team, automation is your ticket to effective scalability. A few critical things you should thinking about automating are your marketing emails, social media posting, and lead capture/CRM. When you’re not spending time doing menial tasks, you can focus on more important things like conversion-rate optimization (CRO).

Conclusion

At this point, the setup may be over, but everything else is just getting started. You'll need to promote your ecommerce store and grow a consistent source of traffic to drive revenue.

At the end of the day, it becomes more than clear that setting up a multi-channel eCommerce campaign might be an incredibly difficult task unless you can turn it all into a unitary network, controllable from a single terminal. Those who manage to pull this off will quickly realize that running a multi-channel ecommerce presence isn’t that much harder than running a single effective e-store.

Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.